Wildflowers
steven hall
16 November – 3 December 2023
Wildflowers presents Steven Hall’s latest collection of paintings depicting landscapes and flowers from the inner north of Melbourne. Located near where the artist lives and works, they are representations of the artist's life by proxy.
Some works present closely cropped picked flowers and reflect life in the city, while others are intimate scenes looking through the branches and flowers of trees, through grasses and gardens.
Wildflowers signifies flowers as wildlife in an urban metropolis. Titles of the individual pieces are inspired by passages from works of literature like Dante Alighieri's Inferno.
More than just pretty pictures, whilst making these paintings Steven Hall wanted to learn as much as he could about painting light & shadow and colour theory, and to share what he had learnt through this exhibition. The final pieces are minimalistic botanical paintings with bold contrasts in colour and light values: bright and dark.
By exploring the overlooked and celebrating the beauty found in the everyday, these paintings are all about making the invisible visible.